Category: Blog
Our team of experts explores interesting topics relating to data analytics, industry news, and more!
post: The Impact of Legalized Cannabis Programs on Illicit Marijuana Markets in the United States
As of 2025, 40 states, three U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia have legalized medical cannabis programs, while 24 states, three territories, and Washington, D.C. have legalized adult-use recreational cannabis. Many jurisdictions now operate dual-license cannabis markets that support both medical and adult-use sales. As legalization expands across the United States, policymakers, regulators, law […]
post: Armanino Case Study: Analytics Company Gains Strategic Edge by Validating Its Data Model
June 05, 2023 At a Glance Customer Profile NCS is a big-data analytics firm that offers a SaaS platform for the monitoring, compliance and enforcement needs of financial institutions and government agencies charged with managing industries that operate in complicated legal and regulatory environments. When one of NCS’s financial institution clients was acquired by a […]
post: The CLIMB Act in the U.S. Cannabis Market in 2026
The financial services industry has created meaningful, though still limited, opportunities for legal cannabis businesses in recent years. Despite the rapid growth of state-legal markets, cannabis remains classified as a Schedule I substance under the Controlled Substances Act. This classification continues to create a fundamental tension: activities legal at the state level remain federally prohibited, […]
post: NCS Thea – Risk Scoring in U.S. Legal Cannabis Markets
At the center of NCS Thea is the Lending Risk Score, a dynamic, continuously updated measure of repayment risk for each retail location. It’s designed to provide a clear, simple view of business health, backed by a wide range of operational data. The score is updated twice a month, based on two reporting periods: the […]
post: Legal Cannabis and the Entourage Effect
As the cannabis industry has progressed, consumers have increasingly gravitated towards strains with high THC levels. Cultivators for years focused on breeding strains that would produce higher THC levels, but is that still the focus today? Even though research is limited in the cannabis industry, it was clear that there had to be more to […]
post: Testing Methods in U.S. Regulated Cannabis Markets
There are many different methods laboratories use to test the quality and value of cannabis. Here are some of the most common testing methods that laboratories use when testing operators’ harvests:
post: Bringing Transparency to a Complex Industry: The NCS Transparency Project
In highly regulated industries like cannabis, access to clear, reliable data has historically been limited. The NCS Transparency Project was created to change that. As a publicly available data portal, it provides industry insights designed to improve understanding, support better decision-making, and promote transparency across a rapidly evolving market. By making complex datasets easier to […]
post: Introducing NCS Thea
Illuminate Risk. See Clearly. Lend Confidently. Introducing Thea We’re excited to introduce NCS Thea, a new way to bring clarity to cannabis lending. Inspired by the concept of transforming complexity into insight, NCS Thea converts operational and financial data into a single, easy-to-understand risk score—empowering lenders to assess risk quickly and make more confident credit decisions. A […]
post: NCS Risk Index
Identifying suspected inversion and diversion activities through data. The NCS Risk Index (launched publicly on August 19, 2025) is a proprietary scoring feature within the NCS Analytics Platform. It is designed exclusively for cannabis regulators to turn overwhelming seed-to-sale data into simple, prioritized enforcement decisions. Core Concept It functions like a risk score for cannabis licensees (businesses or specific locations): […]
post: Manipulating Statistics in Data
Statistics includes various aspects of analysis, such as the collection of data as well as its interpretation. In the media and throughout the statistical analysis process, there are known methods to intentionally influence the data to provide statistics to favor an author’s viewpoint. Data manipulation can start with its collection. Suppose you searched online for […]